What does her blood alcohol content have to do with whether it was statutory rape?
I’m not linking, but there were three confirmed cases of date rape at a particular local fraternity house utilizing intoxicants: two involving GHB and one involving rohypnol, and resulted in the victim’s death.
Her impairment due to alcohol means (in this state) that although she could (and probably did) give verbal consent, she could not legally give informed consent. In other words, she consented to an act that she would not have consented to sober. I am not a lawyer, and I may be wrong about the legal side of this.
I know about a dozen close-ish friends who have had their drinks drugged. Three were bartenders who were working at the time (and now are pretty damned vigilant about making sure guys who buy drinks or shots for women do not touch them before the women, should they accept, drink them). About 1/3 went to the hospital. Only one was raped / had sex while she was blacked out, and she didn’t report it (she wasn’t 100% sure if the guy she went to her hotel with had been the one who drugged her, though it certainly looks that way). All have been drinking long enough to know how one or two alcoholic drinks affect them, which is why most were smart enough to know something was wrong before they blacked out or collapsed.
I also have a few friends (male and female) who have taken GHB willingly, as a party drug. All the women hated the experience, which lasted hours and mostly left them passed out. Fun!
ETA Didn’t realize this was GQ when I responded– hope I didn’t get too IMHO.
I thought statutory rape only applied to being underage, though.
I thought statutory rape was anything that was rape by statute, including any group who is unable to consent. I can’t seem to find a clear definition; I may just be using the word incorrectly. She’s certainly well over 18!
I have to suspect that someone is not being honest if a dozen of your close friends have been drugged this way. I’m a bar fly. I have spent much of my adult life in bars - gay bars, punk bars, dive bars, clubs, music venues, you name it. And, unless there is a serial drink drugger in your area, it just doesn’t happen all that often. In fact, I have never actually seen or personally known anyone who this happened to.
I witnessed a woman telling her girlfriend that she was drugged at a punk show, and that is why she blacked out/puked on herself/had to be carried home by very annoyed acquaintances/left her car at the venue/lost the money in her wallet. She claimed to have only had two beers at the bar, one of which must have been drugged. Now, having been near her most of the night (mutual friends), I knew this was pure BS. She’d started with flask shots in the parking lot and worked her way down from there. All the money she “lost” went to pay for beers for herself and, in fact, several other women as she became more liquored up and flirty. I heard her repeat this story several times whenever the idea of drinks being drugged came up, as “It Happened To Me!”
Was she just flat out lying to cover her behavior? Did she actually believe her own story? No idea. Her girlfriend sure didn’t, after a few of us mentioned that it was bull, but people she later told probably did. And then you have more and more people with examples about a friend of theirs that was drugged at the bar.
I doubt this – if you knock an adult woman unconscious and then rape her, I can’t imagine it’s any other kind of rape than ‘rape’ rape.
In the case I’m talking about, the sequence of events seems to be:
(Her story, version #1)
I was in a bar one morning having breakfast with one tiny alcoholic drink.
A friend of a friend slipped me the date-rape drug there.
My friends saw him take me out of the bar, but next thing I remember,
I woke up in bed with him right there, both of us naked.
These factors make it implausible as a drugging: a known assailant who committed the assault in front of witnesses (including removing her from the bar to his home) and then stuck around afterwards in a vulnerable state.
(#2 My pieced-together version of what I think happened)
I was in a bar one morning, drinking heavily.
A guy I barely know looked appealing in my severely inebriated state.
I went home with him and we had sex. During or after, I blacked out.
I woke up without any memory of consenting to or having sex, and concluded that it must have been the date-rape drug.
I don’t know what kind of rape that would be: it’s certainly not violent sexual assault (“rape-rape”), and it’s certainly not unimpaired consensual sex. I’m pretty sure it’s rape by California law, and I’m pretty sure she reached for the drug explanation to avoid the implications of her decision-making process (getting drunk, that is).
ETA: Just to be clear, although I think she could have easily avoided the situation, I personally consider that the man took advantage of her and therefore I consider it rape. The whole point of the anecdote was to show how the date-rape drug was used as a fictional cover-story in a real-life situation.
I was at a concert with VeryCoolSpouse who had a drink or 2, no more, and passed out from the crowd and heat. I carried her out. No one made any comment.
I was with friends, however, which might skew the sample.
I didn’t even realize it was possible to survive a BAC of .31 .
And here I thought you were a college graduate. 
Except she’s also Irish so I trust her not to know the difference between drunk and sober. If she says she has never been drunk but not from lack of trying then she is lying. People (especially women who generally have less body mass) who “try” to get drunk, as in drinking many mixed drinks or doing many shots, tend to get drunk. They might not realized it, but they are drunk.
And it isn’t uncommon to suddenly feel drunk after a few or even one mixed drink if you are tired, haven’t eaten, or the drunk was mixed badly (or well, depending on your desire to get drunk).
You can, and beyond, but you have to work up to it. My late wife was a med-tech and they are the ones the cops go to to draw blood and test the BAC. As a consequence, any time a bunch of them get together, they trade top BAC levels they have encountered. Hers was .67 One of her professors’ record was .82 which is past the LD50 for most folks. The guy was walking around (albeit not in a straight line).
As a side note, she may have been lying about the BAC as well. I don’t know why she would, since it undermines her entire story, but it is possible she exaggerated it for some reason. On the other hand, she has (hopefully had, past tense!) the sort of history with alcohol where such a BAC is plausible.
Trom said:
Alcohol impairs judgment, as well as reflexes and vision. That is why it is illegal to be drunk and drive. You have a responsibility to limit your drinks or arrange that you won’t drive after you get drunk and your judgment is impaired. That is why drunk drivers can be held responsible for the things they did while impaired. They allowed themselves to become inpaired and didn’t control for foreseeable results.
Arguably, a woman who allowed herself to get drunk in public did not control for the foreseeable result that her judgment would become impaired and she might then choose to do something or with someone she wouldn’t otherwise choose. The argument is that she plans to limit her drinks, but someone “helps” her by giving her stronger drinks or more drinks and encourages her “just one more”, etc, until her judgment has been impaired and she cannot consent.
The difference is being in charge of your own body and what happens to it (consent), vs. being responsible to what you do to others. You have the responsibility to control what you do to others, but the right to safety and security of yourself. Thus the apparent double standard.
Whether you agree with that logic, that is what is enshrined in laws in several states.
astro said:
Consider this scenario: predator selects a woman who has had a few, but not wasted. He buys her a drink that he dopes, and has a conversation with her. Being in her proximity and interacting with her establishes the appearance of some familiarity. As she starts to get loopy, he then “assists” her out of the bar. Any bartender/bystanders ask, he says “my friend has had a couple too many, I’ll just see her home”. Do they have a reason to suspect he isn’t her friend? Now if she has other friends around, they might notice and say/do something. But if she’s by herself, or temporarily separated from her friends, it might be possible without being noticed.
Not saying it is a frequent occurrence, but plausible.
The Piranha Brothers said:
True, the test only indicates that the drugs were ingested, not how they came to be ingested. For that, you have to rely on the testimony of the person - which may or may not be reliable.
If the woman is pliable enough I suppose this is possible, but it also assumes the predator is working a very tight time window given the approx 15 - 20 minutes or so until the drug fully takes effect and the victim is reeling or unconscious, at which point he will soon have an unwieldy human sack of potatoes on his hands to hoist around. If the objective is to have sex it just seems like a massive hassle and fairly high level of risk on multiple levels vs paying for a few extra drinks.
In addition women claiming they were drugged are quite often with friends, which makes no sense whatsoever as a sexual predator will have no chance at all to abscond with an unsteady women who is being protected by her friends.
To expand on a few points, “consent” is not the same thing as “responsible”. You are always responsible for your actions. But you are not always in a rational state of mind where you can make a decision requiring consent.
Also, “drunk” as it applies to rape does not mean that anytime you have sex with a woman who has had a few drinks it is rape. Drunk in this case generally means drunk to the point where the person is incoherent or falling down drunk.
I find it interesting that I haven’t been able to Google any statistics on cases of date rape drugs being used. Lots of information about the drugs. Not so much on the stats. Maybe someone can post a link if their Google-foo is better than mine.
Your Google experience is the same as mine re lack of info, and is one of the reasons I asked the question re how real the threat is of being drugged by roofies in public venues. The only study (such as it is) seems to indicate that the overwhelming number of women who think (or claim that) they had been drugged, were in fact simply victims of their own binge drinking.
I have no doubt that roofies have been used in private settings to molest unconsious women, it’s the claimed level of public venue drugging that seems a lot more implausible for reasons I’ve already stated upthread.
Well many a predator might not have done his homework and be familiar with the small time window they have.